Here we are with season 4 of Battlestar Galactica (I might do a thing on the miniseries, razor, and the plan at some other time). To quote Ronald D. Moore at one of his panicked last minute writing sessions, “let’s wrap this sucker up!”

There are spoilers in this post that mated with caveman spoilers 150 000 years ago.

I’ll be honest, most of season 4 doesn’t really matter. The Demetrius ultimately leads nowhere. Baltar’s cult ultimately leads nowhere. Both of those points get several episodes worth of work and build up, but do nothing or almost nothing in the grand scheme of things. The scrolls of Pithea are false and mean nothing too. Starbuck’s missing ovary amounts to nothing. Simon’s supposed research on Cylon reproduction means nothing. Oh, and Tigh’s baby doesn’t materialize into anything and neither does Tyrol’s. I’m suspicious that all the sudden baby shuffling around season four is done to make Hera more important.

What does matter in season four is the dreaded FINAL FIVE. Oh noes, what are they going to do… not much actually. Turns out they don’t really know the way to Earth, but instead they hold within them the secret to resurrection. Bad retcon, but fair enough.

This is as good a time as any to point out that the cylons, that invincible force of machines that has had no less than ELEVEN SPIES in the human fleet has only been able to pull off one successful act of sabotage (two, if you count the explosion Baltar causes by giving a nuke away to them), one successful murder, and one suicide bombing. In four seasons… with eleven spies. Wow, these guys suck. Whatever sense of menace they used to hold is long gone at this point.

The only arc worth mentioning in this one is, of course, the mutiny arc, which is pretty solid precisely because it sticks to the human part of the story (although they do some creative editing by dropping Tyrol’s demand for cylon citizenship on their “previously on” segment and never mention it again). Still, it’s a pretty solid set of episodes, and certainly the best ones in the season.

It’s unfair to say that the religious aspect of the show comes out of nowhere in this last season, but it’s just as unfair to say that the level of religion isn’t heightened with Starbuck’s return. We go from God quietly influencing key characters with visions and whatnot to God building vipers and making copies of people. It’s a stretch, and it’s fair that some viewers had a hard time with it.

But now, we must reach the end of this series of posts, and the end of the show…. and oh what an end it is. I don’t even know where to begin. Oh yes, here:

Anyone who thinks that dovetailing the science fiction story of Battlestar Galactica into actual human history on this planet was a good idea is fucking insane.

I’m sure Ronald D. Moore thought he was really clever when he came up with it… but he didn’t come up with it, did he. He probably did it as a reference to Battlestar Galactica 1980, which was totally not silly and awful and the butt of countless science fiction jokes. Look, you don’t need to be an anthropologist or a historian to realize why ending this show’s history at our pre-history is absolutely stupid. Think about it for one second and any number of things should jump to mind. English has existed in its current form for more than 150 000 years? The cavemen in Africa needed white people from space to come down and sophisticate them? We’re half cylons now? So that’s why I can’t cure cancer with fetal blood.

The show also glosses over a reaaaaally hard to swallow premise: the idea that every human in the fleet is okay with giving up all the technology and shelter they own in favor of living in the dirt with cavemen. From a writing standpoint, they deal with this in a childishly simple way with a conversation between Romo and Adama. I’m going for memory, but it goes something like this:

Romo : Isn’t it absolutely stupid to expect people to give up all their creature comforts?

Adama: Yeah you’d think so, but they did.

Romo : Oh.

That isn’t good writing. We don’t get to see the perspective of any one of the people doing this, Moore just tells us it’s so and we’re expected to buy it.

Oh yeah, and all those visions that Roslin, Boomer, and Six have been having of Hera going through the opera house culminates in Six and Baltar picking her up just long enough to carry her fifteen fucking feet down a hallway. It’s not her “destiny” to go down a hallway and end up in the CIC as Cavil’s hostage. It’s her destiny to pass on her genetics to us (as stupid as that is), and Six and Baltar have nooothing to do with that. Nice payoff guys, nice.

But what really does it in is the final two minutes, where Ronald D. Moore leaves us with some of the most profound and original knowledge of science fiction : “We need to be careful with our technology, or else it could get out of hand”. WOW. The last little bit of this episode absolutely bludgeons the audience with this to the point where it truly insults BSG’s supposedly intelligent fanbase. I thought it was pretty clear, since this message was at the start of every episode in the whole “cylons created by man…” thing. We get to the end of this show and all Ron has to leave us with is “the robots are coming!! Watch out!!”

This is a show about tough decisions and hard hitting tragedy. It ends with them quite literally fucking our ancestors and telling us that the robots are coming.

Now we arrive at season 3 of BSG, and things really start to get out of hand. Let’s take a look shall we? If you haven’t been keeping up, at least go read my season 2 post, where I state the Golden Rule of BSG.

All these spoilers have happened before, and all of them will happen again.

We are dropped into this season on the planet, and we spend several episodes dealing with getting off of said planet. The escape sequence is really great, and it will go down as one of the best special effect sequences in this show. There’s one episode about suicide bombings where the writers really don’t have the guts to get into the morality of it, they seem to be using it more as politically hot window dressing than anything else.

“A Measure of Salvation” is one of those profoundly irritating Golden Rule of BSG type episodes. Cylon physiology is not something that the writers have nailed down at all, but it’s something that they keep using in their plotlines. The virus that infects and kills them, but not humans makes no sense for reasons I won’t get into. It also commits the same Battlestar sin that the Pegasus arc did, by giving Roslin the “tough decision” of using biological warfare, but then robbing her of the consequences of it by having Helo disrupt their plan.

“Hero” is truly one of the worst episodes on the show in terms of Cylon Detection and Battlestar’s retroactive writing. Here, we see a guy get on the ship and get tested by the cylon detector, by the doctor on the ship, without the nuke, and it works and shows him as human. So…. if we remember waaaay back to the earlier episodes, we saw the same detector display red for Boomer, when Baltar lied to her. So, the detector can display both a correct positive (Boomer) and a correct negative (Bulldog) without baltar and without the nuke. Therefore, the thing works. Therefore, they should have tested people in key positions with a tribunal of 13 people (they know there are 12 cylons) and bam, they could have caught them all.

Although, “catching them all” isn’t all that important (unless you play pokemon). The cylons, at this point in the show, carry little to no menace at all. We keep hearing about “the final five”, but this is a race of machines that can’t get the job done with their unlimited army and the spies they do have. They’re no longer a believable threat, they’re these generic antagonists that the heroes occasionally swat at, because the heroes are the important ones.

Here is when I really realized that the Cylons as a race are written so that they don’t have to be written. There are way too many examples, but the writers seem to come up with a fact about the cylons only when it’s absolutely necessary to the story they are telling, and this fact never needs to be binding. One easy example is the number three stating that six killing her with a rock was “the first cylon on cylon murder in their race’s history”, when this just isn’t the case, since Boomer shot a six in one of the very first episodes. This is easy fact checking type stuff, guys!

The standalone episodes towards the end of the season return, once again showing us the Golden Rule of BSG in full force. “The Woman King” has everybody on the crew be extremely concerned with what colony people are from (their treatment of racism) for one and only one episode. “Dirty Hands” addresses the working class dudes in the fuel ships, whom we never hear from again.

This season also starts a new running trick that the show pulls. Whenever the writers need to make anything important, they say that it somehow “points the way to Earth”. Even the Final Five supposedly “know the way to Earth” at some point in the show, but this is given up in favor of Starbuck’s magical ship knowing the way instead.

Starbuck’s return is hardly surprising, since the show is absolutely in love with the character. What is surprising is the nature of her return, which is something I’ll address in the next post.

Here we are on season two of our review of Battlestar Galactica. I advise you to read the season one post first, but if you’re a rebel or a Cylon you might not want to just to spite me.

Spoilers are hidden throughout this post, there are many copies.

Season two starts off with a really great series of episodes following the finale of the first season, which I neglected to mention in the last post, but it’s shocking and pretty excellent. Several episodes are devoted to getting several groups of characters back together and restoring the status quo.

We need to stop here, because we have hit the first truly hate-worthy episode of BSG, “Flight of the Phoenix”. In this episode, Boomer hooks herself up to a temporarily networked Galactica computer to repel the Cylon computer virus. She manages to somehow make a counter virus or throw the virus back at them or something, because it shuts off all the enemy ships and makes them easily killed.

This, once again, raises several questions about Cylon Detection which are certainly still looming from season one. We’re told they’re identical to humans in every way physically and therefore they cannot be detected, but she can hook into a computer and hack it with her blood or her neurons or whatever. Alright… no.

Moving on, the way she shuts off the largest force of cylon ships is an easy way to get a dramatic ending to the episode. I don’t know why the colonials don’t use her to shut off EVERY cylon ship they encounter from then on. They have the equivalent of a technological superweapon.

This is where we must stop and forge what I will call the Golden Rule of Battlestar Galactica:

“The creators of Battlestar Galactica will sacrifice ANYTHING they have built up or previously established in favor of the moment”

The show is very good at drama and has some really good actors (Mary McDonnell rules), but we’ll see as time goes on that again and again this show feels no obligation to stay consistent with anything if it makes for good drama. As I said, the drama is really good, but it’s falsely earned, and doesn’t fit into the series in a meaningful way, it’s just drama in a vacuum.

The pegasus arc is a pretty satisfying series of episodes that puts the crew of BSG up against a parallel crew, offering for a great contrast in command structures and whatnot. It’s tense, but it also starts the second problem with the later seasons of this show, where they get their key figures to make “tough decisions”, but unlike Lee in season one, they don’t have to actually live with them. We see this very clearly when Adama resolves after much deliberation to have Cain murdered. Of course, the show makes it so he doesn’t have to live with this decision by having the escaped Cylon prisoner do it instead. It’s an uncharacteristically neat ending to the arc, but not a completely awful one.

After this, we have a series of one off episodes, most likely because the show is now a 20 episode season instead of 13. “Black Market” is truly atrocious, and it demonstrates the Golden Rule of BSG very well. Lee is shown to have been sleeping with a prostitute for a while, SHOCKING! This is dropped after this episode and never mentioned again. The moment wins out in BSG every time.

When I first saw this show, I was bothered by the way Moore shakes up the series at the end of this season. Looking back on it now, I’ve warmed to it a little. It’s a little bit of a hollow gesture, since all the ramifications are dealt with by episode 6 of the next season though.

This is the last season of Battlestar that is at all salvageable. Get out while you still can… or follow me to the next post, where we’ll tear down season 3.

This series of posts has been on my back burner for quite a while now. We’re going to take a little journey and travel through all four seasons of Battlestar Galactica, as I talk about the rise and fall of one of the best and then most irritating shows I’ve ever seen. Today on the mineshaft? Season one.

Oh, of course there will be spoilers in this post and the next three, but never once will I use the word “frak”.

BSG started off as a truly ballsy and interesting show. The miniseries that starts the story begins with one of the most grim openings I’ve seen in a TV series. We see a truly rag tag fleet on the run from a mechanized army of infinitely respawning clones that are truly out to destroy them. They’re shrouded in mystery, but not only that, there are several of these Cylons hiding in the fleet, ready to strike when the humans least suspect it.

Holy shit. For season one, this series is a truly white knuckle ride as we see the Cylons constantly dogging Galactica, sabotaging their water supplies, and sending in a suicide bomber.

The characters need to make tough decisions, as we see Lee haunted by his choice to blow up a ship that was potentially full of innocent people. Roslin, a school teacher, becomes the long shot president and needs to shoulder the responsibility of leading the human race. As Marty McFly would say, this is heavy.

There’s not a bad episode in the bunch this season. Honestly. It’s really strong throughout. As a season of tv, it’s a really strong unit, giving a variety of space battles and good character episodes. Every crisis that comes up is new and compelling as we see the colonials run low on water, trying to rebuild their political system, and of course, trying to discover the Cylon menace hidden in their fleet.

There is some weird stuff too, such as the enigmatic “head six” that Baltar sees, guiding him around and seemingly bringing him kicking and screaming into making heroic acts that he doesn’t seem ready for. We see the direct consequences of these actions, but we don’t know what the larger scheme is. Questions loom in the viewer’s mind, the good kind of questions.

The only negative I will bring up is the bad kind of questions that loom in the viewer’s mind. This comes mainly from the Cylon detection device, which brings up the question of Cylon detection in general. This device is definitely weirdly handled both in season one and in the rest of the show, but it doesn’t really start bothering me until later. If you’re going to read through all of these posts, just make a mental note of the cylon detector now, because unfortunately the writers brought it back later.

Season 1 of BSG is totally worth watching for any science fiction fan. As you might expect from this post, my opinion will only sour from this point out, and I think many fans had a similar experience. Even the most hardcore BSG supporters must admit that the show went downhill in some capacity since the first season. The steadily slipping ratings as viewers leave the show seem to agree with me as well.